Sonoma County was the real birthplace of wine in California. But with its wealth of agricultural abundance, the region could have become the Golden State's dairy capital, apple king, berry bastion, or even big cheese. The fact that Sonoma's wine ended up as its No. 1 commodity, and then went on to win international acclaim and comparison with the best wines in the world, is due to the dedication and hard work of people as rich and fertile in character as the soil they till. In Beyond the grapes : an inside look at Sonoma County, wine writers Richard Paul Hinkle and Dan Berger unearth the stories and histories behind the region's best wineries and their wines. These are tales of people who blend artistry, ancestry, love and respect for Nature, dreams, risk-taking, technology, toil and luck--and then bottle and label it with their own personalities. Photographer Jena-Paul Paireault, who has photographed Franc's most famous wineries, cam to California to capture the spirit of the 94 Sonoma wineries included here and displays them splendidly across the book's pages.

"Lured by the discovery of gold to cross the plains to California in 1849, Haraszthy became the first sheriff of San Diego, a member of the California legislature, and the first assayer of the United States Mint in San Francisco. Long fascinated with the possibility of growing fine European grapes in America, he moved in 1856 to northern California's Sonoma Valley, where he built the first stone wineries in California, introduced more than 300 varieties of European grapes, and planted (or helped his neighbors plant) more than a thousand acres of choice wine vineyards. He made a well-publicized wine tour of Europe in 1861, wrote the first notable book on California wine growing, and built his Sonoma estate into what was widely advertised as "the largest vineyard in the world.""--BOOK JACKET.

Robert Graysmith reveals the true identity of Zodiac—America's most elusive serial killer. Between December 1968 and October 1969 a hooded serial killer called Zodiac terrorized San Francisco. Claiming responsibility for thirty-seven murders, he manipulated the media with warnings, dares, and bizarre cryptograms that baffled FBI code-breakers. Then as suddenly as the murders began, Zodiac disappeared into the Bay Area fog. After painstaking investigation and more than thirty years of research, Robert Graysmith finally exposes Zodiac’s true identity. With overwhelming evidence he reveals the twisted private life that led to the crimes, and provides startling theories as to why they stopped. America’s greatest unsolved mystery has finally been solved. INCLUDES PHOTOS AND A COMPLETE REPRODUCTION OF ZODIAC’S LETTERS

Winner of the Western History Association's 2009 Hal K. Rothman Award Finalist in the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the Western Nonfiction Contemporary category (2008). The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the world's most beautiful cities. Despite a population of 7 million people, it is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. A vast quilt of countryside is tucked into the folds of the metropolis, stitched from fields, farms and woodlands, mines, creeks, and wetlands. In The Country in the City, Richard Walker tells the story of how the jigsaw geography of this greenbelt has been set into place. The Bay Area’s civic landscape has been fought over acre by acre, an arduous process requiring popular mobilization, political will, and hard work. Its most cherished environments--Mount Tamalpais, Napa Valley, San Francisco Bay, Point Reyes, Mount Diablo, the Pacific coast--have engendered some of the fiercest environmental battles in the country and have made the region a leader in green ideas and organizations. This book tells how the Bay Area got its green grove: from the stirrings of conservation in the time of John Muir to origins of the recreational parks and coastal preserves in the early twentieth century, from the fight to stop bay fill and control suburban growth after the Second World War to securing conservation easements and stopping toxic pollution in our times. Here, modern environmentalism first became a mass political movement in the 1960s, with the sudden blooming of the Sierra Club and Save the Bay, and it remains a global center of environmentalism to this day. Green values have been a pillar of Bay Area life and politics for more than a century. It is an environmentalism grounded in local places and personal concerns, close to the heart of the city. Yet this vision of what a city should be has always been informed by liberal, even utopian, ideas of nature, planning, government, and democracy. In the end, green is one of the primary colors in the flag of the Left Coast, where green enthusiasms, like open space, are built into the fabric of urban life. Written in a lively and accessible style, The Country in the City will be of interest to general readers and environmental activists. At the same time, it speaks to fundamental debates in environmental history, urban planning, and geography.